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We DID Build That, Mr. President!

I have gotten several comments on my previous blog, saying that I have entirely misconstrued Barack Obama’s statement about who built what. I disagree. Mr. Obama’s statement is, at best, built on faulty logic and, almost certainly, designed to mislead.

Let’s take a look at the argument for Mr. Obama’s statement. That argument is that the government and innumerable government-paid programs are responsible for allowing businesses to be successful. Mr. Obama’s example from the stump speech in Roanoke was that government research created the Internet and, then, allowed companies to make money from it.

Similarly, teachers, schools, roads, and heaven only knows how many other things in the President’s mind are all government-provided crutches, only through the use of which are businesses allowed to stand. None of these crutches were provided by business is the argument of the President and his supporters. These things were provided by the unidentified “somebody else” of the President’s speech. Presumably, this somebody else is everyone else, the taxpayers of America that pay for the government and all of its programs.

Perhaps we have finally identified who is actually responsible for my success. It’s the American taxpayer that the President credits with the business success of all American businesses!

Well, that is exactly where the lie was slipped under the noses of Americans. Exactly when everyone was feeling so good about themselves for supporting all these programs that allowed the creation of Microsoft, Intel, Apple, Cisco, Google, and countless other successful businesses large and small, the lie was slipped past them all without anyone noticing.

The truth is that the vast majority of American taxpayers paid for none of those programs. Not one program and not a single dime.

You see, the government is paid for by American businesses, with the exception of individual taxes paid on capital gains and maybe some other, obscure taxes of which I am unaware. The cynics and conspiracy theorists among you will say “I knew it all along.” That is not at all what I mean here.

Every tax dollar paid by an employee in America was first earned by the company that employed them. The taxes, whether they are income, property, or sales taxes, all came out of the salary paid to the employee by their employer. Those taxes only resided, temporarily, in the bank account or investments of the employee.

So, now let’s look at who built that. Who built the schools and paid the teachers? Who built the roads? Who paid the researchers that created the Internet? The answer to all these questions is the same and it is definitely not “somebody else”.